


canary

by kosy



Category: Twelfth Night - Shakespeare
Genre: F/F, Feste is a Woman, Unrequited Love, inspired by real events!, second person narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-23
Updated: 2019-10-23
Packaged: 2020-12-28 23:15:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21144845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kosy/pseuds/kosy
Summary: You are a fool,herfool, and so you sing when she bids you. You always have.





	canary

**Author's Note:**

> it's midnight, and i had a million other things i was supposed to be doing, which is really the only reason anyone ever writes a fic like this. nothin' like some good gay longing.

Your role is to watch, of course. That’s how it goes when you are a fool, and your mother was a fool, and her mother was a fool, and hers, on and on and on probably since this blessed, cursed house was set here on this green-gold hill. There is a garden and endless halls and little birds that nest in the roof. There is you, walking through this grand, winding house on a hill, strumming the same guitar your mother played, and her mother, and hers. Or maybe it’s not the same guitar. It doesn’t matter if the guitar is the same; the job is the same no matter how many generations you go back. You watch. You laugh, and you hope others laugh too. You sing. You jest, banter, jab, discourse. But mostly you watch. 

You grew up in this house. In your memory, it’s stained with jewel tones. You remember a girl, willowy and regal at all of seven, imperiously demanding a song, and her skin is the color of gold, of the bright glass in the windows of cathedrals. You remember singing, no guitar yet, just your young voice, high and clear as a lark’s, babbling out some catch you’d heard your mother singing with old Toby. You remember her clapping, smiling, and her elder brother clapping too, but all you can see is the gold of her skin and the emerald of the trees in the garden and the intense cerulean of the skies above when you collapse dramatically onto your back after bowing, laughing because she is laughing. It’s maybe then that you understand why your mother comes home so late, guitar slung up over her shoulder, cheeks dark and eyes bright and smile curling up wide. Why would you sleep when you could have this? 

You’ve known her name for as long as you could sing. _ Olivia. _It drops off your tongue like a prayer, and so you never put it to melody. It is too honest, even for you, a woman who makes her living off of honesty so sharp it stings. 

She flees her studies to come sit with you, leaned up against the old birch tree behind the house. You open your mouth to speak but she puts her finger up against your lips to hush you and you hush. She gives a satisfied grin, flops to the soft, root-twisted earth. _Tell nobody, _she whispers, and you almost laugh. Who would you tell? A fool keeps her secrets. 

_Shall I sing for you, lady? _Her nose is a hair’s breadth away from yours, her breath on your lips, and you need a reason to close your eyes. 

_What will you sing of, Feste? _She cocks her head at you, gray eyes dancing with secret mirth. Two girls beneath the old birch, you do not say. A fool whose heart beats out of her chest. 

_Whate’er it is my lady wills I sing. What else? _Too earnest anyway, for all your hesitance. 

Nevertheless, she laughs delightedly and swats your arm, gives no answer. You sing, and let her rest her head in your lap, watch silken hair spill out over patched trousers. You try to make the song witty, as you know she likes cleverness, but you cannot remember the words, stumble by mistake into the lower harmony. It doesn’t seem to matter much—she cups your cheeks in her soft palms like a benediction when you finish with an exaggerated flourish and you try to memorize the face of your lady, your beautiful girl, speckled with sunlight-shadows through leaves. 

The house is stained with jewel tones in your memory, and you can’t quite pinpoint where it turns sepia. You watch her grow up. Her coming-of-age party is absurdly opulent because with Olivia it could be no other way, and you are happy to sit in a window-nook and watch these nobles drink and shout and push each other. The dogfight of politics, the politics of pretending it’s not a dogfight at all. Your mother finds you in the midst, eyes crinkling up into well-worn lines, and she thrusts a guitar into your hands. It is yours, you realize without knowing how. Your fingers are calloused from a youth of playing, fretting and fingerpicking, humming to every half-heard song, and you are just barely on the other side of eighteen, and you have known no other life, don’t even know if you’d want to. _ Sing, _ she urges you, _Sing! _and something in your chest falls out of place just as another something finds its way in, and she disappears back into the crush of people. You close your eyes, and you sing, and the room falls into a hush. Behind your eyelids, you are aware of the stares of the dukes and the duchesses and the lords and the ladies, and you know exactly where she is in the midst of it all, and you can imagine the smile on her face, and it makes you smile. 

After, she finds you, hops up into the window-nook. You hear her dress catch on the rough wood sill as she slides in next to you, but she doesn’t seem to notice or care, and so you don’t point it out. You watch her through eyes lazily half-slitted, and she watches you right back, her own eyes so large for her face and so _ open,_ so earnest. 

“It was a beautiful song, fool,” she says softly, and you tilt your head, an easy cat’s smile on your face. 

“Anything to please my lady,” you return dryly, but her lips turn upward so fondly you almost feel chastised. You look away, eyes flickering downward. Your tongue feels thick; none of the words you usually have in such infinite supply leap to you now and so you are silent. Her fingers brush over the callouses on the tips of your fingers and you look at her again, something constricting inside you, and you feel heat rush to your cheeks, but she does not seem to notice. Her eyes are cast outside, toward the night. You wonder what she sees in those silent constellations. You watch: the almost imperceptible pulse fluttering in her fine throat, the quick flicker of her eyelashes as her gaze jumps from star to star, the pass of breath through her nose. The minute press-together of her lips. You watch, and you imagine. Those lips on yours. On your throat, your collarbone, your breast. The delicate fingers splayed out across your ribcage, curled tight in your hair. You imagine how she would sing. 

She doesn’t take her eyes off the stars. “Sing for me again.” She is eighteen, too, young and afraid and so desperately alive it almost hurts to look at. 

You breathe as even as you can, in and out, and you begin to sing. 

Her father dies. Her brother too. She stops asking you to sing for her. You keep trying, and she stares through you, the marble woman. There was a time when you were young that you might have envied who she has become, her riches and her power and her servants and her songs. You don’t envy her now. She sends you to Orsino’s court often of late; she tires of your songs and your jests and she does not flinch away from telling you so. You entertain a great many in your absence, you’re sure. You were trained for this, and so it is no real pain for you. Only—you have wanted to travel since you were a girl, but it holds no joy, this worn road between his house and hers and wherever else it leads. Two prisons, different in nature, but both prisons nonetheless. You may have never suffered any grievance at Orsino’s hands, but you detest his melancholy, his passions as vast and shallow as floodplains. He throws himself at your lady’s door and you offer him a smile and a song as you turn him away, which is more kindness than you’ve ever offered any of Olivia’s other suitors, but he scoffs at you through his heaving sobs and comes back again the next week. _ Poor fool, _ you tell Sir Toby, lips quirking at the irony of it, and he laughs, but all you can think about is the smell of alcohol on his breath. You watch. The suitors don’t stop, even after she sends you around the entire damned land to announce that she will see no more of them, she is grieving, thank you very much. You have seen the way men look at her, the way men have always looked at her. Orsino is the worst of them all, but he has an open hand and matches you word for word and note for note, and that at least you can respect. You are skilled at swallowing any pride and anger by now, a necessity for any performer. Time passes like wind through empty halls. A new lad comes to the duke’s court, seems to curb Orsino’s endless want, some shining new toy that he is, but then come a few months there’s the boy again, begging Olivia’s audience and hand at the gate. And you see how she shifts in her seat where she lounges like some great cat, this novel spark in her eyes, and you realize it has all changed again.

She is the sea, crashing always at your feet. Changeable. Some days so loud you want to cover your ears from the din of it all, others so quiet you can nearly pretend it’s not even there. A constant, damnable presence; she is everywhere you turn. It is like living on an island. She is a bird, the garden, the stained glass of a cathedral. She is the callouses on your fingers and the guitar that left them there. She is a graveyard filled with flowers. She is a song and a prayer and a name. 

She is, ultimately, not yours. She never was. 

You watch her marry, and you think of a new song. But really, it’s the same song you’ve been singing since the beginning, the same one you’ve always sung. And she does not bid you sing it.

**Author's Note:**

> hey there! hope you’re doing well. please do comment if you feel inclined (or if you saw a mistake so horrendous and glaring you just can't let it slide; either is fine by me). thank you so much for reading this little brainweird i jammed out <3


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